Bread of Life, Presence of God

Sunday, August 4, 2024 – Gospel, John 6:24-35, also Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15, Psalm 78:23-29, Ephesians 4:1-16

I love listening to recordings of Alan Watts, who you can hear almost everywhere on YouTube these days. I first heard of Watts when I was given a set of cassette tapes of his lectures that I’d listen to on long driving trips.

Watts was a philosopher born in England but who later moved to the U.S., finally settling in California. He’d taken an interest early in his life in Buddhism and Hinduism but then earned a masters in theology at an Episcopal school in Illinois. He taught at various institutions but really grew a following when he was a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkley, CA. He died in 1973.

I especially love the way he talked about how to properly understand our relationship to the earth. He would say that we are not like the birds that come from the air to sit on a tree’s branches, but we are to the earth like the apples that grow from within the apple tree. He’d say,

Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer it produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree ‘apples.’ That’s what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!”

It seems that peopling is just what the earth does. Life is a verb! It’s always in motion, in human life and everywhere else too.

As humans, we are “peopled” by the earth itself. The cells of our bodies are built from what we eat, we’re a mixture of star dust, earthly elements, and the breath of God, and we’re born into the earth’s living cycles of growth and decay.

Now the cosmology of Biblical peoples, the way they understood the universe, is that it was a three-tiered structure, where there was a heavenly realm, an earthly realm, and the waters of the underworld below. They envisioned the Earth as a flat disc that floated on the waters of the underworld and that there was a bowl above the earth that separated it from the heavens. The stars in the night sky were holes poked into the bowl that allowed the light of heaven to shine through.

This view is why we have the language we read in our Exodus text and in the psalm where the manna was understood as bread that rained down from heaven. It’s also why Paul’s letter to the Ephesians talks about Jesus ascending into the heavenly realm and descending to the realm below the earth. The words used tell us what the writers believed about the world.

But now that we’ve seen pictures of the round earth from the Apollo missions to the moon, and images of the galaxies and stars beyond our solar system, we no longer believe in a three-tiered universe. Our old mental models have been blown apart.

So, when we read about the bread of heaven, or when Jesus speaks of himself as the bread of life, how can we understand these ideas within our current mental model of the world? I think we need to dig below the words to the deeper truths the words are trying to convey.

In the gospel of John, Jesus’s statement “I am the bread of life” is one of seven “I am” statements. In addition to saying “I am the bread of life,” Jesus also says, “I am the light of the world,” “I am the door”(or gate), “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and “I am the true vine.”

When John uses the phrase “I am,” he’s linking Jesus directly to the “I am” statement of God in Exodus when Moses comes upon the burning bush. Remember, Moses asks God who he should say is sending him when he goes back to the Israelites. God says, “I AM WHO I AM” and then, “say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.”

Now I’ve read Hebrew scholars who say that a better translation of “I am who I am” is “I will be who I will be,” suggesting that God, our source of life, is more like a creative process or energy in motion than like a defined or static being.

We might then say that when Moses encounters that holy presence in the burning bush, he’s encountering the creative energy of the universe.

Throughout the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, we see that everything arises through the work of this creative energy and presence that is God. Everything is sustained or kept alive by the presence of God in the world. There would be no living vitality within anything were it not for the presence of the spirit or breath of God.

When we hear of the quail that appear in the evening so the Israelites may eat meat, and the flaky “bread” that remains on everything after the morning dew has evaporated, we don’t have to force fit ourselves back into a three-tiered universe and believe that God is cutting holes in the dome of the sky and throwing down birds and manna.

What we can know instead is that God pours out God’s life to feed us, and that nourishment arises from within the earth just like Alan Watts’ apples arise from the tree.

Now the people at the Sea of Galilee who ate their fill of the loaves and fishes in last week’s gospel got hungry again, didn’t they? Once again, their bellies were grumbling and so they got in their boats to try to find that guy who fed them the last time to see if he could make that yummy magic happen again.

But Jesus tells them not to “work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” It’s not that he no longer wants to fill their bellies, but that he wants to fill their hearts and their souls with lasting food. He wants to satisfy those deeper hungers I spoke about last week that bread alone can never fill.

To receive that food, we must believe or trust in this human and divine Christ that God raised out of the earth like apples out of an apple tree. God birthed Jesus out of the earthy world as a gift to people hungry for wholeness and salvation.

Christ himself is the gift given by God. He is the sustaining bread.

Not the loaves he multiplies, and not his wise teachings, but his very presence. As we sing at Christmas, Christ is the “Emmanuel,” God with us. Jesus sings the same “I AM” song that God sings from the burning bush. It’s the same song sung by the Word made flesh. It’s the same tune that has been ringing throughout the cosmos since the moment God began creating. Christ is that song and we can trust his presence in this world to fulfill our deepest hungers and needs.